The Generation Gap

Among the more common truisms I’m sure nearly everyone encounters in his or her daily life are such statements as: “The younger generation has become soft” or “Older people are too set in their ways.” There are naturally many variations on these themes, but they all reflect deep-seated and seemingly perennial discord between the “generations.” As a student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968-69, I witnessed first-hand the ugly consequences of the dramatization of these inter-generational prejudices.